Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (13 page)

By October 8, Elizabeth moved to a boarding house—saying briefly, “expect to be happier here”—an arrangement that worked out for her for almost a year.
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Then, in September 1943, she moved to a farm in Castel. The boarding house had managed the food situation well, but it had more rules than the independent Elizabeth could stand (“We were treated more like children in a charity institution”).
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So, by September 19, 1943, she was settled on a farm with full-cream milk available and was once again achieving a healthy weight.
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This peripatetic lifestyle—bouncing from one spot to another—would be the fate of some in the Island. Elizabeth was an outsider, a Scotswoman, with only limited family in Guernsey. She never really regained her footing or a sense of the same community she had when located in her original home.

STRANGLEHOLD

It could be said that those evicted from their homes at least retained their larger home and community of Guernsey, but that too would be stripped from some of them in 1942–1943. German control reached its height during these two years, with regulations moving swiftly past those based on perceived German need (such as housing) and into displays of power and mass punishment. In June 1942, the entire Island was subject to a final confiscation of wireless sets. Rev. Ord recorded the news in all capital letters:
CIVILIAN WIRELESS SETS ARE TO BE CALLED IN
.
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Jack Sauvary was equally taken aback, expostulating, “Oh, what devilish news! We are to lose our wirelesses!”
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If the universal response of despair seems
overwrought, one has to remember the extreme importance of BBC programming to a people isolated from their larger nation during time of war. Most followed the war and news of London ardently, finding encouragement and gaining perspective on the actions of their captors.
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But the real devastation came to those with evacuated relatives on the British mainland, and for whom a loss of even symbolic contact was “a bitter blow.”
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To now have no reliable news and only German propaganda in the local papers effectively widened the distance between parents and evacuated children, Island wives and their husbands fighting in the war, and the population at large from evacuated friends and family members. It was, wrote Elizabeth Doig, “like a death in the house.”
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The June loss of wireless would pale before the events of September. On the 15th of September, an order by Knackfuss was published in the
Guernsey Press
, confirming rumors that had circulated for several days. All British subjects whose permanent home was not in the Channel Islands (such as those stranded in 1940) were to be deported to Germany. The same order of deportation applied to all men aged sixteen to seventy not born in the Channel Islands, and their immediate families. All of the dentists, most of the bank personnel, many key players in medicine and technical professions would be deported.
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Intense panic gripped those soon to be confined in a German internment camp, and turmoil spread throughout the Island. A cluster of English women (many close to seventy) cried openly in Bill Warry's shop, and groups of English-born who had lived in Guernsey since childhood could be found on every corner surrounded by their sympathetic Guernsey friends.
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Rev. Ord tried his best to stem the flood of misery brought on by this devastating news. Ambrose Robin went to Ebenezer Church on Sunday, September 20, to hear Ord “pour out measures of hope and comfort.” Robin was aware that Ord had been a German prisoner in World War I for two and a half years, and “this made you feel that what he said was no idle words.”
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But if Ord could comfort others, he could not stop the anxiety that gripped his own heart, because he, too, was scheduled for deportation. His diary reflected what he carefully kept from others, greeting the news with “Germany! A prison camp! And for the second time in my life. And to have to bear the thought of G. going through what I knew so well—the journey, the food question, the conditions of camp life, the plundering of our home and goods, and ending of my work so dear to me.”
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The situation for ministers was particularly complex, for the German authorities decided that only thirteen could stay. On September 17, a special meeting was held, presided over by John Leale, the head of the Controlling Committee, to sort out what spiritual leadership would be left to the Island. They really had little say in the matter, for ten were already exempt either by nationality or by being over the age.

Through a variety of complicated negotiations, it ended up that the Germans would take three more ministers to fulfill their requirement for the number to be deported. Two ministers had volunteered to go, leaving one space. On the list of those now earmarked to go to Germany, there was one minister ahead of Ord. Dunk was a Foursquare Gospel minister and a man with a young child who was very ill. And thus, Ord had his Garden of Gethsemane moment. He had experienced sleepless nights just dwelling on memories of his first imprisonment and “weighed down” with worry over his wife going through the same. Yet, he came to the decision that he must step in, should Dunk not be exempted, and offer to go in his place. At the last moment this cup was taken from him in the most surprising of ways. The Reverend Donald Stuart of Jersey made the surprisingly ill-timed decision to retire from active service and live on a piece of property he owned in Guernsey. When he arrived at the White Rock in St. Peter Port to move to his new home, he was stopped by the Germans. Examining
his passport indicating English origin, the Germans announced that he would be going to Germany rather than to his retirement property in Guernsey. With this third minister providentially provided, Ord was freed from the sacrifice he had prepared himself to make.
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To compensate for so much bad news, a certain degree of gallows humor kicked in. At their regular Wednesday afternoon get-together, Winnie's friends greeted each new arrival with, “Are you wintering at Homburg or Cologne?” Despite there being a process for medical examinations, few exemptions were actually granted. The Friday after the announcement, the Medical Exemption Board met at Lukis House, forcing invalids to queue up outside in a dismal pouring rain. They had little success in proving their medical need, for they had to be 65 percent unfit to gain an exemption by the board. Even then, they had go before an unsympathetic German doctor to try and confirm their need for exemption.
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Almost everyone was touched in some direct way by the deportation, even those personally exempted. As a widow, Elizabeth Doig was exempt, the deportation being directed at British males and their families, but her brother John and his family were not. So Elizabeth was left behind, knowing that she would miss her brother “terribly as it was on his act. [account] I stayed on the island & did not evacuate before the Germans came here.”
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Unable to effect any substantive change in the situation, the Island as a whole gathered themselves to give the deported a good sendoff to internment camps at Biberach and Laufen. It would be a dramatic enactment of British spirit writ large, a mimetic performance of proper attitude, with the deported and those left behind serving as each other's audience. There was a tremendous “rush to have ‘perms’ done,” according to Winifred Harvey, “and many girls have taken dance frocks and apparently think they are going on a Cook's Tour. I fear they will have a rude awakening but one feels proud of them and the way they have taken it.”
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Winnie and others saw this for what it was: an attempt to mask anxiety with cheerful gestures, a stance echoed by the farewells of “Goodbye, till this time next year,” as if the deported were regular summer vacationers returning to the mainland.
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Not all of these preparations for departure were symbolic, and some required bravery and commitment. Young Guernsey women who were engaged to Englishmen went quickly to the altar so that they could go to Germany together and share the same fate, whatever that might be.

The departure was just about as wearing as it could possibly have been. Torrential rain flooded down upon the Island as families, many with small children, struggled their way to the White Rock and the awaiting ships. Those not required to go turned out to see them off, with “handshaking at every corner & in every street” broken up by German police with their continuous orders to “Move on.”
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Quite of few of the young German soldiers and sailors were visibly upset and embarrassed, turning their faces away from the sodden parade of elderly, invalids, and children in their shabby clothes and drenched shoes, and remarking “Es ist farouk!” (It is outrageous). Winnie would overhear two officers talking later, one of them “gesticulating earnestly and saying, ‘Aber die Kinder!’” (But the children!).
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The bottled-up emotions of the parting had to find some vent, and they largely came out in patriotic expressions, such as the miniature Union Jacks a few deportees held out to catch the wind as they gathered at assembly points.
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Some of the crowds making their way to the White Rock started to sing “Good Old Churchill,” “Rule Britannia,” and other patriotic songs, with the Germans taking no notice of the singers (nor the singers of them).
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And by the time they boarded the boats, they were singing “God Save the King” and “There Will Always Be an England,” with some of the Germans singing along. It all made for, in Bill Warry's assessment, a “happy go lucky parting,” at least on the surface.
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If Guernseymen now felt as though they were standing on sand and their Island home could slide from beneath them without warning, they had good reason for concern. Another “bombshell burst” during the first week in February 1943 when an order went out that all ex-army officers, including those who served in the first World War, would be deported along with Freemason officials and any criminals. It was at this point that the flouting of German orders, whether out of resistance, from simple misunderstanding, or from a scofflaw mentality, exacted its true cost. The Germans defined as “criminal” anyone who had served a prison sentence since 1923.
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Those who had only just recently offended the German forces in some way were summarily deported. Bill Warry told of seeing a young girl of seventeen or eighteen deported (her two sisters seeing her to the ship “like red Indians with crying”) because she sharply told off a German soldier. In Bill's estimation, the incident was the fault of the soldier. Nonetheless, the girl was reported and “got her ticket to go.”
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So, barely six months after the first deportations, the entire process began again. The medical exemption was the same comedy it had been before, as Winifred Harvey reported:

Mrs Barritt Hills told me the Doctor said to her, “How do you do, how are you?”

She said, “Very well, thank you.” And that was that.
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Even the weather repeated the pouring rain of the earlier deportation. And there were similar displays of defiance and patriotism. Capt. Jack Falla turned out to board the boats “looking like a tramp,” only to discard his tattered coat and hat revealing his uniform from the First World War, replete with polished medals.
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At this deportation, unlike the one six months previously, the German police made an attempt to control the crowds. They pushed the locals who had come to bid farewell “from pillar to post,” only to have the crowd swell forward and push back. In a little boast seeking triumph out of powerlessness, Bill Warry claimed that “they got tired first.”
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These events of the middle years of Occupation reset the relationship between occupier and occupied, as the German forces reached the height of their power in the Channel Islands. The evictions of Islanders from their homes, the ending of uncensored outside information by confiscation of the wireless, and the deportations of undesirables (in the German view) from the Island spoke of a widespread exercise of control. It should be noted at this point that, even with the iron grip of power in effect, no one in Guernsey had any inkling of the Final Solution or the depths of evil of the Nazi regime. The deportees went off to internment in Germany with the exact same concerns that they would have going to internment in France. They did not expect good conditions or excellent treatment, but they also had endured hardships at home under German control. The response to deportation, in the diaries and in life, would have been quite different had anyone known that death camps were operating in Germany. Without this knowledge, the Islanders left behind saw in the deportations a disturbing increase of German control, but nothing so ultimately sinister. Even so, with the heightened cruelty evinced during these years, Guernseymen and women felt the need for a new understanding and a deeper reading of these men who held power over them.

BEHIND THE MASK

The middle years of the Occupation presented a series of crises prompting a reassessment of the occupying forces. Spence et al. describe crises as “unanticipated events that throw off the everyday patterns of life,” and as ones characterized by “high levels of potential danger.”
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By this definition, there could be few clearer examples of crises than the increasing slew of orders and resulting arrests, the ripping of Islanders from their homes, and the sudden deportations to an unknown future in Germany. Crisis events by their very nature increase the level of uncertainty in individuals and prompt a desire for information that could help them manage that uncertainty.
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Reducing our uncertainty about the other party is a basic need in most early one-to-one encounters; thus, this process has generally been studied in the area of interpersonal communication.
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Simple monitoring of the other is a “passive strategy” that is generally available when direct interaction and manipulation of a situation are not possible.
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Uncertainty is generally uncomfortable,
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but not always a negative feeling. A sense of uncertainty may actually have the positive attribute of buoying optimism in the face of threat.
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The lack of solid information about the German internment camps was anxiety-provoking, but that void provided an opening for hope. The flip side of our anxiety about the future is the possibility that things will turn out better than we anticipate.
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Yet, if the Islanders looked to a rereading of the occupiers seeking reassurance, they found very little to ease their minds.